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I run gentoo on a dual xeon server with 6GB of ram just fine. It is a web/db server for a high traffic website. Used to run redhat but we converted it to gentoo and its running very smoothly. I notice apache to be running a lot better under load then it was with redhat. At my previous work, our mail server farm ran gentoo which was under heavy load during prime internet hours, now the servers didn't have the kind of specs as yours does but they were still able to handle the load.

Thats interesting...Which database did you use then, mysql,postregsql?? Its interesting to know if it scales good any IO-problems...but if you ran a webserver with high traffic it must have ben alot of IO and load.

Used mysql. Gentoo has to be installed by downloading from remote sites. Gentoo ports work just the same way as bsd. You can get a bare server up and running if you use the stage3 install. If rh 7.3 could handle your db, I see no reasons why gentoo could not meet the same performance if not an surpass it since the entire os will be optimized for your server. Do you use XFS as your fs on your current box?

Here it is for yr reference, gentoo is cool

but when I Tried to install gentoo last night, well stuck in the middle when trying to creat grub.......................... then gave up............. still I think I am more into Redhat based systems such as Redhat and Mandrake.

Below quote from the installation guide of gentoo

Creating filesystems

Now that the partitions have been created, it's time to set up filesystems on the boot and root partitions so that they can be mounted and used to store data. We will also configure the swap partition to serve as swap storage.

Gentoo Linux supports a variety of different types of filesystems; each type has its strengths and weaknesses and its own set of performance characteristics. Currently, we support the creation of ext2, ext3, XFS, JFS and ReiserFS filesystems.

ext2 is the tried and true Linux filesystem but doesn't have metadata journaling, which means that routine ext2 filesystem checks at startup time can be quite time-consuming. There is now quite a selection of newer-generation journaled filesystems that can be checked for consistency very quickly and are thus generally preferred over their non-journaled counterparts. Journaled filesystems prevent long delays when you boot your system and your filesystem happens to be in an inconsistent state.

ext3 is the journaled version of the ext2 filesystem, providing metadata journaling for fast recovery in addition to other enhanced journaling modes like full data and ordered data journaling. ext3 is a very good and reliable filesystem. It offers generally decent performance under most conditions. Because it does not extensively employ the use of "trees" in its internal design, it doesn't scale very well, meaning that it is not an ideal choice for very large filesystems, or situations where you will be handling very large files or large quantities of files in a single directory. But when used within its design parameters, ext3 is an excellent filesystem.

ReiserFS is a B*-tree based filesystem that has very good overall performance and greatly outperforms both ext2 and ext3 when dealing with small files (files less than 4k), often by a factor of 10x-15x. ReiserFS also scales extremely well and has metadata journaling. As of kernel 2.4.18+, ReiserFS is now rock-solid and highly recommended for use both as a general-purpose filesystem and for extreme cases such as the creation of large filesystems, the use of many small files, very large files, and directories containing tens of thousands of files. ReiserFS is the filesystem we recommend by default for all non-boot partitions.

XFS is a filesystem with metadata journaling that is fully supported under Gentoo Linux's xfs-sources kernel. It comes with a robust feature-set and is optimized for scalability. We only recommend using this filesystem on Linux systems with high-end SCSI and/or fibre channel storage and a uninterruptible power supply. Because XFS aggressively caches in-transit data in RAM, improperly designed programs (those that don't take proper precautions when writing files to disk, and there are quite a few of them) can lose a good deal of data if the system goes down unexpectedly.

JFS is IBM's own high performance journaling filesystem. It has recently become production-ready, and there hasn't been a sufficient track record to comment either positively nor negatively on its general stability at this point.

If you're looking for the most rugged journaling filesystem, use ext3. If you're looking for a good general-purpose high-performance filesystem with journaling support, use ReiserFS; both ext3 and ReiserFS are mature, refined and recommended for general use.

Based on our example above, we will use the following commands to initialize all our partitions for use:

XFS is a much better filesystem to use then ext3 for large databases. Out performs it on i/o, resize on the fly, and can recover journals almost instantly(will never have to run fsck), 64bit fs, and acls. I only use xfs on my database servers now as you can really tell the performance difference when you have a large database under heavy load.

XFS is a filesystem with metadata journaling that is fully supported under Gentoo Linux's xfs-sources kernel. It comes with a robust feature-set and is optimized for scalability. We only recommend using this filesystem on Linux systems with high-end SCSI and/or fibre channel storage and a uninterruptible power supply. Because XFS aggressively caches in-transit data in RAM, improperly designed programs (those that don't take proper precautions when writing files to disk, and there are quite a few of them) can lose a good deal of data if the system goes down unexpectedly.

Some of that is untrue. Before switching over to xfs, I did extensive testing to like interrupting the power while writing mass amount of data to the disk at once and writing scriptings which are constantly updating a large database. Well I have never loss data yet. XFS is designed so you do not lose data and can recover almost instantly.